Wednesday, 13 November 2013

I watched Man of Steel again yesterday, and all I can say is that on second-viewing, I'm impressed by Zak Synder's subtlety. He captured Superman's insectile origins quite superbly -- native Kryptonians fly aback demon dragonflies and travel the stars in space-beetles! -- and never once tried to compare this creation of two Jews writing at the advent of the Second World War to anything inappropriate:

I was also impressed by his integrity. During the hour-and-a-half-long climactic fight scene, Snyder could have gone for gore and showed the human toll of Superman's decision to move the fight from one heavily populated area to the next, but he never let you forget that the Real Victims™ are people too, my friends:

I mean, Zod was blinded by our Terran sun when he threw Superman into that 7-11's gas pumps. It was just an innocent bystander! Fortunately, Superman's here to avenge those pumps' deaths:

Zod will have none of it. "I'm stronger than you, a warrior bred," he tells the symbol of Truth, Justice and the Americans Who Matter, right before tossing him into one of our most sacred temples:

Now Superman's the one having none of it. "YOU CAN BREAK MY PANCAKES, BUT YOU CAN NEVER TAKE MY --

But before Superman can stop Zod from trolling the planet, a minion throws a U-Haul van that you can rent for $19.95 a day by calling 1-800-GO-U_HAUL at an army helicopter, so he can't worry about the broken pancakes, because he has a more important person to save:

JESUS CHRIST -- no pun intended -- are you an idiot? You already saved him. 7-11 is fine. What you mean he's still in danger?

I don't care how that shot's framed, Kal-El. She's about to literally shoot that man with eye-lasers. Where are your priorities?

Monday, 11 November 2013

This week’s episode of The Walking Dead, “Internment,” may well have been the strongest in what’s shaping up to be the strongest season to date. It was directed by David Boyd,
one of the most talented men you’ve never heard of. He’s been the
director of photography on such visually uninspiring fare as Firefly and Deadwood, so it should be no surprise that the composition and shot selection in “Internment” was barely this side of breathtaking.

What do I mean?

For one, Boyd’s use of close-ups in this episode weren’t used to
cheaply intensify scenes whose dialogue lacked emotional impact. Unlike, say, the opening credit sequence of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, which closes in to bring the pain
and reassure you that the police always have your best interest at
heart, the close-ups in “Internment” function as the necessary
conclusions to terrible arguments.

Consider, for example, this close-up of Rick’s gun:

It’s the culmination of the should-he-or-shouldn’t-he-pick-up-arms
subplot, but instead of having Rick say something about it, Boyd just
places Rick’s gun in-frame and lets it speak for itself. Note, though,
that the gun’s slightly off-center, a screen-position people have been
trained by Hollywood to hate.

The audience, then, is primed for something to happen — and
conventionally, that “something” would be that the camera shifts to the
left and “properly” frames the gun, dead-center, since it’s the most
important element in the shot.

Boyd knows that’s the expectation — he knows that his audience craves symmetry in its compositions — but instead of conceding to audience expectations, he recapitulates the should-he-or-shouldn’t-he argument:

When Rick’s pea-bearing hand enters the frame, Boyd racks the focus,
shifting the emphasis from the arms he just took up to the green
thumbs he put them down for. In a single shot, then, Boyd’s reminded
the audience of the Big Decision Rick had to make, but he did so
without having to use dialogue as a crutch, as the show so often has.
What could have been a tossed off transition between scenes in which
characters indulge in unnecessary expository monologues is, instead, a
seemingly tossed-off reminder of past soul-searching.

Thursday, 07 November 2013

Remember SEK's NEIGHBOR?
The one who thought SEK belonged to a gang because of his backward hat?
Well, this morning SEK decided it was about time to start watching The Sopranos,
and so when he was driving home from the grocery store and saw his
NEIGHBOR, SEK thought it'd be a great idea to slow his car to a crawl
and give NEIGHBOR a good eye-fucking. The fake neighborhood "police"
started driving around until, finally, MR. POLICEMAN -- with NEIGHBOR in
tow -- knocked on SEK's door.

MR. POLICEMAN: Have you been threatening this man?

SEK: What? No.

MR. POLICEMAN: Is that your car?

SEK: Yes.

MR. POLICEMAN: He says a man in a hat was threatening him this morning.

SEK: (points to hair) I'm not wearing a hat.

NEIGHBOR: It's you! You have a hat!

SEK: I'm sure I do somewhere. What's this about, officer?

MR. POLICEMAN: Have you been speeding recently?

SEK: I've been in Houston, my sister just had a baby. Wanna see a picture?

NOT REALLY AN UPDATE: For the record, what I thought was going to happen turned out to be funnier. What's the point of living life as if it were performance art if it refuses to perform? Sigh:

The fake neighborhood "police" just drove by, and I can't
help but wonder what they're looking for: "Suspect is an off-white
late-model academic, so use extreme caution, he may have an ethnicity.
Repeat: he may have an ethnicity."

(And after they bust in and shoot me, they'll be all like, "It's
terrible, sir, it's terrible. The books! THEY"RE EVERYWHERE. On the
floor, there're little ones on the table, looks like he broke their
spines. OH THE HUMANITIES!")

Monday, 04 November 2013

Last week’s episode of The Walking Dead, “Isolation,” focused on who was with whom and the tightness of the quarters they shared, i.e.
how isolated every single person in this episode wasn’t. The title of
this week’s episode, “Indifference,” is equally ironic, because the
entire episode is about inappropriately caring too much — whether it be
Rick caring about Carol enough to banish her, or Daryl caring more
about Bob the Alcoholic than he should’ve.

But that’s not what I want to discuss this week. Not because it’s
insignificant, as it clearly isn’t, but because in visual terms, this
episode is much more about what people do than who they are or what they feel. The episode announces as much in the opening shots:

That’s Rick bandaging his hand, and hands are important. Hands do things. And the director of “Indifference,” Tricia Brock, is not about to let the audience forget this:

The jump-cut from
the medium shot of Rick bandaging his hand to the close-up of his hand
while he’s bandaging it is Brock’s way of gesticulating wildly at this
episode’s theme, which I’ll call “The Terrible Things We’ve Done With
Our Hands.”

Before you object that every episode of The Walking Dead
features many hand-oriented shots, since characters are constantly
thwacking walkers through the head, let me assure you that I already
know that. Brock’s shot selection in “Indifference” isn’t different in
kind from other episodes, but in degree. Consider the second sequence
with Rick before the introduction rolls…

Monday, 28 October 2013

The title of tonight's episode of AMC's The Walking Dead
couldn't have been more misleading: "Isolation" is an episode about the
utter lack of isolation in the confined settings of a
prison-cum-anti-zombie outpost. Even those moments in the episode in
which characters were ostensibly isolated -- as when Herschel tells Carl
that "It's peaceful out here" when they're "alone" in the woods
collecting elderberries -- were undermined by:

Or, even more obviously, when Daryl, Michonne, Tyrese and that-other-guy-from-The Wire
were driving along an empty road and heard voices on the radio,
indicating that they weren't isolated, and then ran into this lot:

Those are the more prevalent examples of the episode's visuals
defying its title, because they're both keyed in on plot points:
Herschel appreciates being alone when he isn't, and Daryl et al
accidentally run into one of the most populous zombie hordes on the
show to date after hearing a faint voice on the radio. But I'm more
interested in how the visuals themselves undermined the idea that this
episode was, thematically, about "isolation," and you can see hints of
it in that first image of Carl and Herschel above.

If you look at it, there are three planes within the frame: in the
foreground, you have Herschel; in the mid-ground, you have Carl; and in
the background, you have the walker. All of the planes are occupied in a
way that, conventionally, makes a frame feel "crowded." If a director
-- in this case, Daniel Sackheim
-- uses a shot in which three people occupy all three planes in an
episode once, you might not notice it. But in this episode, Sackheim
consistently stacks the frame, almost from the opening shot of the
episode...

Friday, 11 October 2013

SEK was driving to the Winn-Dixie,
about a block away from his house, when a man ran into the street waving
his arms wildly. SEK pulled over, thinking the man’d just chopped off
some vital extremity with his lawnmower or something.

SEK: You need help?

MAN: Hey, you don’t live around here, do you?

SEK: I — are you all right?

MAN: I don’t know you.

SEK: I live just around the corner (SEK said, pointing to his domicile).

Tuesday, 08 October 2013

A few weeks after the finale of Lost, Chad Post attempted to defend it
by claiming that its nonsense was the stuff of art. “What’s
interesting,” he argued, “is how these six seasons functioned as … a
great work of art [that] leaves things open to interpretation, poses
questions that go unanswered, creates patterns that are maybe
meaningful.” I’m not interested in discussing the merits of the Lost
finale – whether all of the “survivors” Oceanic 815 were dead the
entire time or some of them were only dead most of time doesn’t matter,
as they’re both the narrative equivalent of convincing a child you’ve
stolen its nose: it only works because kid’s not equipped to know it
doesn’t.

Defenders of the Lost finale, of course, have no such excuse
and are instead forced, like Post, to recapitulate aesthetic theories
they half-remember from high school – in this case, the quasi-New
Critical theory that elevates the interpreter over the work of art. It’s
the critic, after all, not the artist, who benefits from “leav[ing]
things open to interpretation.”

The New Critic was an archeologist of ambiguity, teasing from every contradiction he encountered a paean to the antebellum South. They valued ambiguity as an aesthetic virtue because poems and novels that possessed it could be made to be about anything, which freed them to make statements
like, when it came to great works of art, “all tend[ed] to support a
Southern way of life against what may be called the American or
prevailing way.” And they did so by being ambiguous, which allowed the
New Critics to say, without irony, that great works of art celebrated
“the culture of the soil” in the South. This, dear reader, is the brand
of literary and aesthetic theory you were likely taught in high school,
and by its druthers, Breaking Bad‘s not even a work of art, much less a great one.*

In fact, by this standard, it’s quite possibly the least artful
narrative in the history of American television, and because of this,
it’s the first show that deserves the label “naturalist.” The naturalist
novels of the early 20th Century were tendentious in the most base
sense of the word: any tendency that appears in characters’ personality
early in a book will, by its end, have metastasized into impulses so
vast and deep you wonder why they even tried to repress them.

For example, in the first chapter of McTeague
(1899), Frank Norris compares his titular character to a single-minded
“draught horse, immensely strong, stupid, docile, obedient,” whose one
“dream [was] to have projecting from the corner window [of his "Dental
Parlors"] a huge gilded tooth, a molar with enormous prongs, something
gorgeous and attractive.”

There’s your premise: McTeague is dumb and stubborn, especially in
the service of his vanity. In the next chapter, when he tries to extract
a tooth from the mouth of a patient he’s fallen in love with, it’s no
surprise that “as she lay there, unconscious and helpless, very pretty
[and] absolutely without defense … the animal in [McTeague] stirred and
woke; the evil instincts that in him were so close to the surface leaped
to life, shouting and clamoring.”

“No, by God! No, by God!” he shouts, then adds “No, by God! No, by
God!” He tries not to sexually assault her, but fails, “kiss[ing] her,
grossly, full on the mouth.” Moreover, his failure revealed that “the
brute was there [and] from now on he would feel its presence
continually; would feel it tugging at its chain, watching its
opportunity.” When the woman, named Trina, wakes from the procedure, he
proposes to her with the same stupid vehemence with which he tried not
to assault her:

“Will you? Will you?” said McTeague. “Say, Miss Trina, will you?”

“What is it? What do you mean?” she cried, confusedly, her words muffled beneath the rubber.

“Will you?” repeated McTeague.

“No, no,” she cried, terrified. Then, as she exclaimed, “Oh, I am sick,” was suddenly taken with a fit of vomiting.

One of the most prominent features of naturalist prose, as you can
see, is stupid, ineffective repetition in the face of adversity.
McTeague can shout “No, by God!” as many times as he’d like, but he
still assaults her, and no matter how many times Trina says “No, no” in
response to his “Will you?” the only way this ends well for either of
them is if she vomits all over his office. Given such favorable initial
conditions, would it surprise you to learn that after she wins the
lottery, he beats her to death? Or that the novel ends with him
handcuffed to the dead body of his best friend, who he also beat to
death, in Death Valley?

Because McTeague is a naturalist novel, it shouldn’t. The
key phrase buried in the previous paragraph is “initial conditions,”
because when you’re in the presence of a naturalist narrative, they’re
all that matter.

By now, I’m sure it’s obvious how this relates to Breaking Bad:
in a real sense, the second through fifth seasons mark the inevitable,
inexorable consequences of what happens when someone with Walter White’s
character flaws is put in the situation he’s put in. Like his forbear
McTeague, he’s incapable of developing as a character: he can only more
robustly embody the worst aspects of his fully-formed personality.

This is why, in naturalist novels and Breaking Bad,
repetition is so significant: it’s only when provided with a reminder of
where the narrative started that we’re able to recognize how much the
central character hasn’t changed. Every time we see another visual echo
from episodes past – and in the fifth season, they come fast and
frequently – we’re reminded of how committed Walter is to his vision of
himself as a heroic figure struggling against a universe determined to
wrong him. Consider this shot from “Bit by a Dead Bee,” the third
episode of the second season:

Walter is in his hospital bed after the shoot-out with Tuco in the
desert, which happened after he had been missing for three days and, of
course, which almost got his brother-in-law Hank killed. He’s also
claiming that the cancer treatment ate the memory of the walkabout it
sent him on. The difference between the man he is – one who’s capable of
devising a cover story for his meth-related absence that involves
playing cancer for sympathy – and the one he imagines himself to be: the
one in the boat, about to leave his family alone, possibly defenseless,
while he heroically sets out into the great unknown. The next time he
sees that image, he’s in a motel room surrounded by white supremacists
planning the coordinated execution of the remainder of Gus’s crew. The
director of “Gliding Over All,” Michelle MacLaren, moves our eyes around the scene before settling on a convoluted long shot:

MacLaren is fond of shots in which you’re forced to follow eyelines around the frame in order to make sense of the scene,
and like that banquet in the “Second Sons” episode of Game of Thrones,
it’s only after you’ve done the work of following everyone’s eyes around
the room that you realize that the most important element in the frame isn’t actually in the frame.
Once you follow an eyeline to an uninteresting terminus, you move on to
the next character, so if you start analyzing the frame from the center
and track on action, you’ll move to Kenny stretching and follow his
eyes (red) to the floor, then Frankie shuffles in place, so you look at
him and follow his eyes (blue) to the table, but since that seems
unpromising, Todd catches your attention when he shifts his weight, then
you follow his eyes (green) to the bed, which means that McClaren’s
direction has compelled you to move your eyes around the screen until
you reach the area of the bed at which Todd’s staring, which is puts
them right next to Walter, who has remained stock-still
throughout. She didn’t need him to move or even speak to draw your
attention to Walter, she’s done so by other means. Once she has you
where she wants you, she has you follow his eyeline (yellow) to its
terminus, which is off-frame.

Following eyelines to their rainbow’s end is a function of film that
doesn’t necessarily pique our curiosity, but when we come to the end of
our journey around the frame and the most significant character in it is
staring at something off it, we desperately want to know what
he’s looking at.** McClaren knows that we’ll be less interested in the
frame when we find out what he’s staring at, so beginning with that long
shot (14:43), she cuts to a medium close-up on Jack (15:06), a close-up
on Kenny (15:10), a medium shot on Todd (15:13), an extreme close-up on
Jack (15:17) that racks to a medium shot on Frankie (15:20) before
reversing to the initial medium on Jack (15:23), then back to the
initial medium close-up on Jack (15:24) before jumping to a clean medium
on Frankie (15:28), then to a more extreme close-up on Jack taking a
drag (15:29), then she moves back to the close-up on Kenny (15:31), then
back to Jack (15:35), back to Kenny (15:39), and back to Jack (15:41)
until finally returning to Walter (15:50), who is of course
still staring at something off-frame. McClaren’s refused to provide us
with the information we desire for more than a minute at this point, but
it wasn’t a typical minute.

According to the Cinemetics database, the average shot length (ASL) in “Gliding Over All” is 5.8 seconds,
but as you can see from above, after that initial 23-second-long shot
of Jack, the scene has an ASL of 3.8 seconds.*** Lest you think I’m
using the kind of “homer math” that leads sports reporters to write
about how their team’s ace has the best in ERA in the league if you
throw away the four starts in which he got rocked: I’m sequestering this
bit of the scene and treating its ASL in isolation because we watch
scenes sequentially and in context.

The shift in the pacing of editing created the impression that
something really exciting was happening, but “four guys in a motel room
talking about doing something exciting” actually qualifies as exciting;
the other alternative is that the shot-frequency accelerated because
McClaren was building up to something exciting, like the revelation of
what Walter is staring at. The editing could be doubling down on the
anticipation created by that intial long shot: as frustrating as it is
to watch shot after shot fly by without learning what’s on that wall,
the editing’s at least affirming our initial interest in it.

Or was, until she cut to the close-up of Walter staring at the
painting (15:50), and because it’s a close-up of someone staring at
something off-frame, you assume that the next shot will be an eyeline
match, but no, MacLaren cuts back to Jack, who’s explaining to Walter
how murdering ten people is “doable,” but murdering them within a two
minute time-frame isn’t. In a typical shot/reverse shot situation,
especially when it’s in the conversational mode as this one is, you
expect the eyelines to meet at corresponding locations in successive
frames. If Walter’s head is on the right side of the frame, and it is,
you expect Jack to be looking to the left side of the frame in the
reverse, and he does:

The sequence is off-putting because Walter’s violating cinematic
convention in a way that makes us, as social animals, uncomfortable. On
some fundamental level, the refusal to make eye contact is an affront to
a person’s humanity, so even though Jack’s a white supremacist with a
penchant for ultra-violence, we feel a little sorry for him. He is,
after all, being ignored in favor of we-don’t-even-know-yet, but at
least it’s something significant. MacLaren wouldn’t have put all this
effort into stoking our interest in something of no consequence, but
that doesn’t mean we’re thrilled when she cuts out to the initial long
shot in which whatever-it-is remains off-frame, or when she cuts to an
odd reverse on Walter, who asks “Where do you suppose these come from?”

How wonderful is that “these”? We’re finally going to learn what
Walter’s been staring at, but even the dialogue is militating against
our interest, providing us with the pronoun when all we want to see is
the antecedent. MacLaren holds on Walter for one last agonizing beat
before finally reversing to this image of the painting (16:09):

This reverse shot seems more conversational than the last – again, in
a way that insults Jack’s essential humanity, or whatever passes for it
among white supremacists – only now the conversation isn’t between
Walter and any of the actual human beings sharing that motel room with
him, it’s with himself.****

“I’ve seen this one before,” he informs the very people he just
insulted. It’s not that he’s wrong – it is the same painting he saw after
he ended up in the hospital, and the timing here is crucial. In “Bit by
a Dead Bee,” his outlandish plan had just been successfully completed,
so when he looked at the husband heroically rowing out to sea, nobly
sacrificing himself for the family he’s left behind, he sympathetically
identified with a man who shared his current plight, who had made a
decision and was following through with it for the sake of those he
loved. But in “Gliding Over All,” he sees the same painting before
one of his outlandish plans has come to fruition, so now when he
sympathizes with the husband heroically rowing out to sea, nobly
sacrificing himself for the family he’s left behind, he identifies with
him because they share a common fate, as both have to decide whether to
continue with their foolishness or return to shore.*****

Astute readers may have noticed that I just wrote the same sentence
with different words. That’s because I did. The only “development”
Walter’s underwent from the first time he saw that painting to now is
that he’s more fanatically committed to the image of himself as the hero
sacrificing himself for his family. Every sacrifice he makes on his
family’s behalf only makes him more of the same same kind of hero he’s
always imagined himself to be.

The presence of this painting – as well as the other visual echoes,
most obviously Walter’s birthday bacon – reminds us that it’s only been
eleven months since the moment he first saw it, in November 2009, to the
moment he sees it in “Gliding Over All,” in October 2010. Naturalist
novels also focused on the rapidity with which can descend in the
absence of a social safety net. McTeague’s life unravels astonishingly
quickly once he loses his job: four months later he and Trina are living
in squalor; a month after that, she moves into an elementary school;
two months later, he murders her; two months after that, he’s chained to
the body of a dead man in the middle of Death Valley. Because of the
kind of person he is, this is how McTeague’s life had to end. Aaron
Paul’s appearance in Saturday Night Live demonstrates just how much Breaking Bad shares this naturalist concern.

I could go on: the short stories and novels of Jack London were about
the opportunities to be had in the wilderness, and the dangers
associated with them. In his most famous story, “To Build a Fire,”
there is a moment in the fourth paragraph when the nameless protagonist
could have, and should have, turned back. Once he makes the decision
not to, his fate is sealed, it just takes another 40,000 words to reach
it. If there’s an art to enjoying a man struggle in vain against his
inevitable doom, it’s been lost to us – or had been, until Breaking Bad,
which demonstrated that there is an audience for naturalist narratives,
bleak and unremitting though they may be. Moreover, the opening scene
of the finale, “Felina,” almost seems like a combination of “To Build a
Fire” and another famous naturalist story, Ambrose Bierce’s “Occurrence
at Owl Creek Bridge.” I’m not saying I believe that Walter dreamed he
took his revenge in the moments before he froze to death, but it’s not
entirely implausible, especially if the series is considered in the
light I’ve presented it here. (Norm MacDonald, of all people, has my back on this.)

The question remains, then, whether Breaking Bad qualifies
as “art.” Literary naturalism’s reputation has faded since the 1930s
because, in part, critics consider it more akin to an experiment than
literature. Literature requires its characters to develop, to become
“round,” as they used to say — whereas naturalists were like scientists
who would rather take a personality type and stick it in fifteen
different environments so they could observe its behavior. When you
consider the conversations that followed George R.R. Martin’s comment about Walter being a bigger monster than anyone in Game of Thrones,
you can see where that temptation comes from, and how powerful it is,
three-thousand comments deep in discussions about whether White would’ve
been more like Tywin Lanister or Roose Bolton.

So is Breaking Bad art? Of course it is. The absurd
amount of detail included above isn’t meant to overwhelm, merely to
acknowledge the level of artistry that went into demonstrating that
Walter hasn’t grown. I would take it one step further and say that even
if you don’t believe naturalist narratives can be considered “art,” Breaking Bad
would still be art, because as much as critics focus on the show’s
content, what separates it from most television is the manner in which
it’s presented. Even if the plot itself were terrible, the manner in
which it’s shot would elevate it to the status of art.

*The main reason New Criticism was adopted as a model was that,
unlike the modes of historicism that preceded it, it was infinitely
scalable. After the GI Bill was passed, even college and university
faculty were worried that their students lacked the educational
background required to write the kind of research papers they’d
previously assigned, but anyone could be a New Critic: all you
had to do was look at a poem and point out what didn’t make sense,
because that’s what it a work of art. Within half a decade, the bug of
student ignorance became a feature.

**If you were paying close attention when the scene opened, you
would’ve noticed, since she opens with a medium shot of the painting,
then pulling back and sweeping to the right. Like many scenes in Breaking Bad,
this one is sequenced backwards, providing us with information before
we can understand – or if you’ve seen “Bit by a Dead Bee” recently,
remember – the significance of it.

****Before you wonder why I’m not just calling that an eyeline match,
because it’s also one of those, keep in mind that not only has Walter
been staring at it with a faraway look in his eyes for almost
two-and-a-half minutes, he now appears to be asking it a question. Also,
in a move seemingly designed to frustrate my former students, check out
the examples the Yale Film Analysis site chooses for “eyeline match” and “shot/reverse shot.

*****The boat seems closer to shore than ship, after all, which only
adds to the nobility of the man rowing it out to sea, because it’d be so
much easier to just turn around.

You are standing in an open field in west of a white apartment
complex, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.

> e

The door is locked. There is evidently no key.

> kick door

I don’t understand that.

> chicago jackboot thug kick

I don’t understand that.

> black panther power

You don’t understand that.

> power of greyskull

Fine. By the Power of Greyskull you open the door. You are in the
kitchen of the white townhouse. A table seems to have been used
recently for the preparation of food. A passage leads to the west, and a
dark staircase can be seen leading upward. To the east is a small
window which is open. On the table is a computer open to Healthcare.gov.

> what is dot gov

Healtcare.gov is a website on the Internet that you can use to find affordable health care.

> what internet

This is going to be a problem.

> WHAT INTERNET

A series of tubes. Information goes through them. You will like it.

> e

You look out the window but see nothing of interest. You return to the computer and look at Healthcare.gov.

> no dont

Yes, you do.

> no, dont

Yes, you do. You choose the state you want to have health insurance coverage in and hit return.

> then what

Hold on.

> then what

Hold on.

> SO THEN WHAT

Fine:

> what in fuck is that

That is an image file. Computers have them now.

> naked ladies

I don’t understand.

> want see naked ladies

Really? You discovered the Internet two minutes ago and all you want to see is naked ladies?

> NAKED LADIES

Fine:

> saw that

You are waiting for the opportunity to acquire good healthcare coverage at a reasonable price.

> am wait for naked ladies

As soon as you have finished signing up for healthcare coverage you can see some naked ladies.

> now

Let me check:

> what about now

Let me check:

> LADIES NAKED NOW

What if you got eaten by a grue? What would happen to you?

> kill computer

You do not want to kill the computer.

> kill internet

You cannot kill the Internet.

> kill kill kill

You really want to kill something?

> KILL KILL KILL

Fine. You have a head cold.

> what

You have a head cold. This morning it migrated to your lungs. You are coughing an awful lot.

> i am

You are. You seem to have acquired a nasty case of bronchitis.

> go doctor

You do not have a doctor. You cannot afford one. Your cough is getting worse.

> fix it

You cannot afford to fix it. You are on the floor covered in specks of blood. You are drowning in your own fluids.

Tuesday, 01 October 2013

The fifth season of "Breaking Bad" is an exercise in
aggressive nostalgia. "Ozymandias," lauded by many as one of the
strongest hours in television history ten minutes in, is especially
committed to reminding the audience how different the world these
characters inhabit is. It opens with a flashback that doubles as a
classic "process" shot, an extreme close-up a cook flask.

But this is no ordinary flashback. This flashback is holding the
narrative hostage. The audience knows that twenty months in the future,
on this exact same plot of New Mexican desert, Hank Schrader and Steve
Gomez are slowly staining the sand red, while Walter White and Jesse
Pinkman are bound, locked and helpless in the backseats of the DEA
agent's vehicles. Something shattering is about to happen...

Thursday, 26 September 2013

The tone being set here is riddled first with uncertainty
(“Where are we?”), then with pointlessness (“Who are these skaters?”),
and potential hazard (“Why so fast?”), before finally answering the
question the opening shot asked (“Why are we wherever ‘here’ is?”). Once
Cranston moves to the crane shot of Walter White’s backyard, we’re able
to place ourselves spatially and temporally.

We recognize the once meth-blue pool in which Pink Bear and Skyler
White floated; we notice the absence of the Lily of the valley Walter
used to poison Brock Cantillo; and we know that the second half of
season five begins where the first half did: one year in the future,
closer to Walter’s 52nd birthday than his 50th.

Wednesday, 25 September 2013

So there I am, a professional nerd watching World War Z with an executive chef, and I giggle when Brad Pitt decides that at the end of the world, the place he needs to be is Cardiff, Wales. Because of course it is. When the world’s ending and the best option isn’t available, you seek out Torchwood.

“What sort of book nonsense are you laughing about now,” my roommate asked.

“Too arcane to explain,” I replied, and that was that.

So Pitt stumbled up and passed out on the gates of the World Health Organization’s Cardiff outpost, which is fine, as the entire world ain’t out to please me meta-textually.

Or so I thought, before Pitt opened his eyes and the camera flipped to his first-person perspective as he awoke from his short coma:

I made a noise like my mind had been blown because it had. Because that’s Peter Capaldi.

So apparently the best option was available, except he’s not playing the Doctor. He’s credited as … “W.H.O. Doctor.”

For the record, principle photography on World War Z began in early 2011, more than a year and a half before Matt Smith announced he’d be leaving Doctor Who, which means the only way all this could’ve been thrown together would be if someone had a …

Saturday, 21 September 2013

After spraining my entire back yesterday, I woke up in a mood this
morning. So when I was assaulted on Facebook by a series of positive
messages about how I should be optimistic about everything, and because
I’m an asshole, I wrote:

Just so you know, every time you post one of those
“inspirational” or “optimistic” quotations on Facebook, in my head I
append “So jump off that building, you’re the goddamn Batman” to the end
of it.

But this should totally be a thing. Like so:

If you don’t know how to edit things on the Internet, well, all the
better. The people who double-rainbow-with-wolf-and-moon these things
don’t either. What have you got?